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Young Cleveland Cavaliers needed a more active leader than Byron Scott: Bill Livingston

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Byron Scott's Cavaliers teams lost 166 of 230 games over his three seasons, a .278 winning percentage, and placed last in the Eastern Conference Central Division every year. (Joshua Gunter, The Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Al McGuire once said that basketball, being fast-paced, brings a sense of urgency to those who coach it.

The late, great Marquette coach and television commentator was defending a forgotten coach who called a timeout only seconds before a prescribed TV stoppage. "You can lose a basketball game at any time," McGuire said.

McGuire thought a coach should spend a timeout when the game was circling the drain. He thought a coach should counsel his rattled team then. Maybe that was just Al, though. But he liked to win.

No one ever satisfactorily explained why Byron Scott, a good player on great Los Angeles Lakers teams, became Byron the Bystander as a coach. But he did. He was that even before the Cavaliers, who fired him Thursday, hired him three years ago.

I also pointed out that Scott, the coach, was not all that different from Scott, the statue. He stood on the sideline, arms folded, impassive, as a 19-0 San Antonio run eliminated his New Jersey Nets team in the sixth game of the 2003 NBA Finals.

Scott, the statue, could have sported a bird's nest on his fashionably shaven head, so stoical was he when four leads of 20 or more points this season went the way of the Nets in the fourth quarter in Game 6.

A 20-point lead expectoration in the last 8:53, due mostly to a 17-0 Pacers run, made the Cavs only the second team, according to a Tweet by ESPN.com and former Plain Dealer reporter Brian Windhorst, in 4,384 NBA games in the shot-clock era to lose a lead of 20 or more points inside the last nine minutes of play.

As for the notion that the Cavs were playing to lose and gain more NBA Draft Lottery ping pong balls, a flimsy theory advanced by defenders of Scott, no competitor who has reached the NBA level would take that as anything but an insult.

Scott took two Nets teams to the Finals and went 2-8 in them. It was better than the 0-4 Mike Brown put up against San Antonio with the 2007 Cavs, the only time the franchise got that far. The Finals runs were supposedly due to Scott's golden touch with point guards, in the Nets' case, Jason Kidd. Scott's lethargic coaching style led to a feud between the two, though. Scott's revival of the New Orleans franchise with point guard Chris Paul after New Jersey sacked him did not last either.

In the two years Scott coached Kyrie Irving, the Cavs' precocious point guard took so well to Scott's methods that he refused to comment on his coach's tenuous status until the last home game. By then, it was probably too late for Irving's endorsement to mean anything, especially after a loss to Miami's LeBron-less, Wade-less, Bosh-less scrubs, in which Irving was one-upped by a steal by the Heat's Norris Cole, a former Cleveland State player, in the last seconds.

This might have been a bit of a leak to the substantial sense of self in young Kyrie, who snubbed the fans in Fan Appreciation Night by bolting to the locker room after the game. Irving's ego became a psychological construct that grew to Macy's balloon size since the often-injured guard made the All-Star Game this season. As early as last summer, Irving issued a joking one-on-one challenge to Kobe Bryant, by this time clearly considering himself one of the NBA's elite.

In the end, Scott could do no more to keep Irving from the entitlement lifestyle than Brown had managed with James. The NBA's marketing breeds this in players, but Irving's immense flaw as an unwilling defensive player was never corrected, either.

Scott is a personable man, well-liked by the media members and most fans. He dealt with substantial injury problems. He is owed another year's salary. There should be nothing personal whatsoever about his firing. It was purely business. A young team cannot be counted on to "figure it out" without leadership of a more active nature than their coach's maintenance of an unruffled appearance during opponents' runs.

Scott's Cavs lost early, and they lost late, and they lost often. They lost 166 times in 230 games, a .278 winning percentage under Scott. They finished last in their division in each of his three seasons.

The Ted Stepien Cavs, always the yardstick for sheer basketball embarrassment here, lost 180 times in 246 games, a .268 pace. They finished last in the division only once in the three years Stepien owned the team, although they came close in the other two.

Scott had to go. But the sad thing is that the one person who can save this franchise now is not the next coach the owner hires. It's the player the owner is still feuding with.

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